Eye of the Whale Read online

  Sliver thrust herself out of the water in a partial breach. The fifteen-ton head came crashing down toward Milton’s boat.

  “Jump, Milton,” Elizabeth shouted moments before the jaw splintered the bow of his boat. Elizabeth and Milton were thrown out of the boat as the planks shattered.

  Elizabeth surfaced and gasped for breath. She was floating in the water, surrounded by countless wooden pieces. Only five feet away, a thirty-five-ton animal was still entangled and trying with every ounce of its strength to get free.

  “Milton,” she shouted, “are you all right?” She knew that Milton, like many fishermen, could not swim.

  “Me here at the whaleboat. Where you, Liza?” he yelled. He couldn’t see her on the opposite side of the whale.

  Elizabeth did not answer. She was no longer thinking of fleeing, as she saw Sliver’s flipper floating just under the water next to her, still straining against the line that encircled mother and calf. Elizabeth reached her hand down to touch the knobby leading edge of the fin, which seemed to stop resisting for a moment.

  “Liza, get away from the whale,” Teo called out with the first traces of fear she had ever heard in his voice.

  The water was unnaturally warm and smelled sickeningly sweet. It was dyed red with blood. Man-of-war birds, like vultures, were circling above.

  A rifle shot startled Elizabeth. “Liza, get to the boat.” It was Teo again.

  Elizabeth saw her yellow Pelican case floating nearby. She took a few overarm strokes to grab it and then swam around Sliver’s massive head. She looked for the whale’s eye, hoping to be able to judge how far gone Sliver was, but it was underwater. When Elizabeth came alongside the boat, she handed up her case. For the second time in as many days, she felt hands grab for her arms and pull her into the boat.

  “Cut her loose,” Elizabeth demanded, panting and barely able to control her temper.

  “She struck deep. If I cut her loose, she still die.”

  Elizabeth looked around at the faces of the whalers. She didn’t know what she was looking for. She certainly wouldn’t find support. This was their moment of glory.

  Uree, the midship oarsman and the youngest man in the crew, looked up at her from where he was bent over listening to the centerboard box. “The whale making noise,” he said.

  Elizabeth unclipped her case. She dropped the hydrophone into the water and put on the headphones, as if the sound could help her save Sliver and her calf. Elizabeth closed her eyes and tried to decode it. Eeee-eeee-eeee. It was a distress call, plaintive and haunting.

  The moan of maternal anguish cracked open any pretense of objectivity shielding Elizabeth’s heart, and she had to choke back tears. Just the day before, she had witnessed the miracle of this mother giving birth and helped the baby to live. And now it was all for nothing—the calf and its mother were being murdered together. Elizabeth breathed deeply and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to will away the sight in front of her.

  She knew this was the islanders’ celebration and communion, but for her the butchery remained an annual penance. The whalers were holding on to the two ropes, the mother’s wrapped around the loggerhead twice, as they pulled on the lines hand over hand, drawing the boat ever closer to the whale.

  Teo picked up the eight-foot killing lance, its steel tip looming above him.

  Elizabeth sprang to her feet before she had even considered her actions. She grabbed the thin brown metal shaft, smooth and worn from years of use. “Let her go.”

  “The harpoon done hit the lung. Is too late for this one.”

  “You promised me you wouldn’t hurt her. You lied to me.”

  “I ain’t know it was Sliver,” Teo replied almost pleadingly. “I promise you.”

  They both stopped dead, the killing lance between them. Everyone heard the sound coming from the far side of the boat.

  It was like a trumpet. Teo knew it well from when he had been foolish enough to try to strike a bull. Elizabeth let go of the metal shaft.

  “Echo come to save his queen,” Milton said, but there was fear, not joy, in his voice. The crew was looking down nervously, trying to see something, anything, in the dark blue of the deep water.

  Nap, the lead oarsman, looked up and cried out, “Watch out—the whale!”

  The tail towered above the boat like the hammer of God. It came crashing down on the water. Everyone fell onto the floorboards as the wake rocked the boat violently. All steadied themselves by grabbing onto the gunwales. Elizabeth braced herself against a bulkhead and wedged her leg underneath a seat. Echo continued lobtailing, smacking his enormous flukes against the water next to the boat.

  “If the whale come any closer, he shatter the boat,” Teo said as he dropped the lance and grabbed the bomb gun. Elizabeth stood up and tried to steady herself as the boat continued to rock.

  “Get out the way, Liza.”

  “Just cut the line!” Elizabeth said, the headphone shaken from one ear.

  “Cap, shoot him, shoot him with the gun,” Rafee, the boat-steerer, cried from the stern.

  Teo took aim with the gun, waiting to see the chest or head.

  “Wait!” Elizabeth shouted to Teo. “The sound—it’s different.” She had heard Sliver’s call several times, but in the commotion she had not realized that it had changed.

  Echo’s tail sliced down into the water like a guillotine and disappeared. “The bull done flee!” shouted Meekel, the tubsman.

  Echo had sounded.

  The crew returned to their seats. Some smiled in relief; others still looked haunted by fear.

  Teo and Elizabeth turned back to the mother and calf. The calf hadn’t surfaced for a long time, tangled as it was against its mother. Sliver had stopped trying to roll away from the boat. Then she lifted her great head out of the water, and in the eye of the whale, Elizabeth could see what had happened.

  The baby was dead. The unmoving tip of the calf’s fin just above the surface confirmed her intuition. Tied to her baby, chest to chest, the mother must have felt its heart stop beating. Was that why she had stopped resisting? Was that why she had changed her call to Echo? It wouldn’t be long now for Sliver.

  Stepping from seat to seat, Teo, with the killing lance in his hand, jumped onto the whale’s back. Usually, it took several stabs to get at the heart or lungs, but Teo had a clear strike, and he raised the lance above his head like a sacrificial knife. He dug the killing lance deep into the heart as a bright red geyser of blood sprayed fifteen feet high and covered Teo and the boat. The men cheered as the thick blood came pouring down like rain.

  Elizabeth covered her eyes with her hand as the blood streaked down her neck and face. She shot a glance at Teo, and he looked back at her, shaking his head ever so slightly. She felt sick and hopeless. With the whales both dead, a deep animal loneliness spread through her chest. It always took days after a whale hunt for that feeling of loss to pass, for her silent, tearless grieving to end. But this wasn’t just any whale hunt, she thought, as she looked down at the lifeless bodies of Sliver and her baby. She longed for Frank. He always seemed to know how to handle the vicious and indifferent severing of death.

  SIX

  7:00 A.M.

  UC Davis Medical Center

  Sacramento, California

  “GET ME DR. LOMBARDI. Get me Dr. Lombardi now!” A mask muffled the obstetrician’s voice, but his order was clear. His hands, gloved and ghostly white, were shaking.

  “Dr. Lombardi just got off. Dr. Wachowski is the neonatologist on duty.”

  “Dorothy, I need Frank for this one. Find him for me, please.”

  DR. FRANK LOMBARDI pressed down the plastic handle on the large stainless steel coffee thermos. Empty. Frank’s eyes were closing, and he needed caffeine fast. He had assisted five deliveries, admitted three babies to the neonatal intensive care unit, and slept all of forty-five minutes in the last forty-eight hours. And he would still need to drive to the airport to meet Elizabeth. On the counter he spotted an abandoned thr
ee-quarters-full cup of coffee and opened the microwave to heat it up. Caffeine was caffeine.

  “Dr. Lombardi to labor and delivery. Dr. Lombardi, please report to labor and delivery immediately.”

  Adrenaline rushed through his body. He looked at the coffee cup in his hand and lifted it to his lips. The bitter taste of cold, unsweetened coffee spilled over his tongue and down his throat. He threw the cup in the trash and ran down the hall to the operating room.

  Frank rounded the corner of the scrub room, peering anxiously through the windows to the brightly lit OR at the limp infant being lifted onto the crash cart. He washed with lightning speed and backed into the room, snatching a towel from the scrub nurse and pulling on gloves. The exhausted mother lay on the bed, surrounded by nurses in purple scrubs and puffy blue caps. Frank spoke in an urgent yet reassuring tone that would encourage but not panic the mother. “Talk to your baby, Mrs….”

  “Bradley,” one of the nurses filled in.

  “Let her hear your voice, Mrs. Bradley.”

  A mother’s voice often had a magical effect on her newborn. Through bleary eyes, Frank looked down at the sprawl of tiny blue limbs lying on the warming bed in front of him. He reached out his right hand to rock the tiny rounded back, trying to rouse the baby, while with his left hand, he held a miniature plastic oxygen mask over the baby’s purple face. His hands worked swiftly and mechanically with long-practiced skill. He was not relying on magic, but he refused to rule out any help he could get.

  Pulling off her own oxygen mask, the mother called out, “Cynthia, baby, wake up. Wake up, baby.”

  The unresponsive infant lay on the white blanket, her eyes nearly shut from swelling. The warmer above the baby glowed red. A scissor-shaped metal clamp was attached to the small remaining piece of umbilical cord. The father, who had been hiding in a corner, terrified, walked over and stared at his child.

  “Mrs. Bradley, please keep talking to your baby,” Frank said.

  “Cynthia, wake up, baby, please, wake up.”

  Frank was hovering with the endotracheal tube, a moment away from inserting it into the baby’s mouth and down the throat. With his other hand, he continued trying to rouse the baby. The baby gasped, took her first breath, and began to wail, an anxious, reedy cry filled with terror.

  After the frenzy of trying to get the baby to breathe, it was only now that Frank was able to look closely at her right arm. Where the hand should have been, there was just an undeveloped stump of a forearm. Hadn’t they spotted this on the ultrasound? Something was wrong with this baby beyond a difficult birth. Frank wondered if she might also have a heart defect, which often accompanied physical deformities.

  Tom Neumann, the obstetrician, was standing next to Frank, clearly shaken.

  “Doctor, she’s hemorrhaging,” the nurse whispered, and Dr. Neumann shifted his attention back to the new mother, firmly massaging the uterus and quietly ordering the nurse to start IV medications.

  “I have to take the baby to intensive care,” Frank said to the nervous parents.

  “What can I do?” the father asked.

  “Help your wife rest.”

  Frank and the nurse wheeled the metal and wood crash cart down the hall. The Bradley baby, her blue skin turning ever more pink, lay crying in the clear plastic examining crib. The newborn screech-squawk had evolved over millennia to be so disturbing that it was impossible for mothers—or doctors—to ignore. Frank’s shoulders and stomach were tense as he reached the NICU and began to give orders, trying to get this child the help she needed, although what that was, Frank did not yet know.

  The nurses helped attach the Bradley baby to monitors that would sound alarms if her temperature, breathing, heart rate, or the oxygen in her blood fell below the normal range. As the baby’s vital signs stabilized, Frank turned to the new nurse to ask her about the other infants. Kim was young and still learning but passionate, and he found her enthusiasm appealing. Elizabeth has been away too long, he thought with a pang of guilt. They spoke once a week on Sundays, but you could not hold a phone call in your arms. E-mails were worse. There was no life in an e-mail, and Elizabeth got to the cyber café on the other side of the island only once or twice during the weeks she was gone.

  It was not just the month and a half they had been apart that had caused the loneliness in his marriage. Even when she was there, her mind and heart were always somewhere else. Had he made a mistake? Maybe they wanted different things. He had tried repeatedly to talk to her about children, but she always said they needed to wait until after she finished her dissertation. It had been six and a half years since they were married. How much longer would they have to wait?

  The coffee had done nothing, and as the adrenaline from the birth dissipated, a wave of exhaustion crashed over him. He walked across the room to check the chart of the Alvarez baby. The NICU had several babies in clear plastic cocoons, with monitors that beeped periodically to show that the babies’ vital signs were normal. Frank tried to warm up the metal chest piece of the stethoscope before placing it on the baby’s tiny torso, already crowded with white and blue monitor pads.

  “Are you going to talk to the parents about corrective surgery? It sure looks funny having the hole on his little thing in the wrong place,” Kim said, referring to the baby’s case of hypospadias.

  “That’s a little guy’s privates you’re talking about,” Frank said.

  “Sorry.”

  “How’s the Chen preemie?”

  “Stable.”

  “What is this—the Love Canal?” Dorothy, the overweight head nurse, walked into the room after reviewing charts.

  Frank grimaced. “A certain percentage of abnormalities is normal.”

  “Well, we seem to have more than our share these days.” Dorothy was noticing, as was he, a small upward trend in birth defects. Fortunately, Tom had been awarded a big grant for the Epidemiological Research Unit, or ERU, as it was called at the hospital.

  The grant was to study birth defects in the whole Sacramento area. To Frank’s surprise, the grant was not from the government or the university but from an organization called the Environmental Stewardship Consortium. Maybe it was one of those private-public partnerships the administration was always touting as the solution to cuts in government health-care dollars. Frank had seen the commercials for the Environmental Stewardship Consortium but knew nothing about them aside from the fact that they were clearly interested in helping hospital research.

  “Have you seen the draft report from the ERU?” he asked.

  “No sign of it,” Dorothy said as they walked out of the room and over to the nursing station. Tom was hurrying down the hall on his way home.

  “Hey, Tom. I was just wondering about the ERU report. I want to see if I’m—”

  Tom glanced to the side, but he didn’t slow down to talk. “Sorry—I’m behind on it.” Seemed a little rude, but perhaps he was feeling guilty about missing the deadline, or perhaps he was still shaken from the difficult birth. Or maybe he was just tired, like Frank.

  “Hey, Tom,” Frank called after him. “My card key to the ERU isn’t working.”

  “I think I heard security was doing something to upgrade the system. I’ll have them get you a new card.”

  Frank flicked the plastic edge of the card key in the pocket of his white coat and watched Tom walk down the hall. He seemed to have a charmed life—his wife adored him and doted on him endlessly, he had great kids, a large house, important research, and now even a beautiful vacation home in Hawaii. How the hell did he afford that on an obstetrician’s salary? Frank looked down, embarrassed for envying his friend.

  “You look like shit,” Dorothy said as she walked up to Frank, only her large girth and XXXL purple scrubs between them. “Elizabeth’s coming home today, right? Don’t you think you should get some rest and clean yourself up a little? Look presentable?”

  “Are you trying to be nice, Dorothy?”

  “The wards are empty, and Dr. Wachowski�
��s here. Go home. We’ll call you if something exciting happens.”

  Dorothy was right. He’d rest up, buy some flowers, and go meet Elizabeth’s plane in San Francisco. Frank twisted his gold wedding band nervously and headed home.

  SEVEN

  5:00 P.M.

  Semple Cay, Bequia

  THE ISLAND WAS CRAWLING with people. Unlike the old whaling station on Petit Nevis, which had room to spread out, Semple Cay was tiny, and people were packed together like ants on an anthill, coming and going, waiting to buy their share of the whale meat. One whale would bring a thousand pounds of meat and as much as fifteen hundred gallons of oil. In the past, everything was given, but now that the whales were scarce, people had to buy their meat and oil.

  The cookout happened only when a whale was taken, and boats ferried celebrating crowds from all over Bequia. Small fires already burned around the island. Men drank Hairoun beer or St. Vincent’s strong rum, cutting it with a swig of cold water between sips. Teo stood over on the bluff, watching the colorfully dressed crowd. He rested a shotgun on his shoulder, just to make sure everything was done in an orderly way and no one started thieving.

  The tails of the cow and her calf lay on the concrete sloped slipway where they had been hauled up with the help of the winch. The once blue-gray water had turned crimson red. Whales were butchered in the water to cool the meat and keep it from spoiling. Waves slopped around the whales, surging against their limp bodies and brewing up a pink froth. A colossal pile of intestines, like a fleet of balloons come to grief, floated away on the receding tide.

  The barefoot butcher, Noble, was hard at work in the belly of the cow, leaning against the backbone and using the sharp cutting spade to carve out two-foot-by-two-foot slabs of meat. The crew then used long flensing hooks to haul these blocks onto the concrete, where they were cut up and sold to the eagerly waiting families. Women were hard at work preserving the meat. Some corned it with salt and laid it on the rocks to dry, others cooked over the wood fires, doving it with onion, garlic, thyme, pepper, and oil.